upward tendencies lead, always aspiring, never resting; as he
sings in "The Sphinx ":--

"The heavens that now draw him
With sweetness untold,
Once found,--for new heavens
He spurneth the old."

"First one, then another, we drain all cisterns, and waxing greater
by all these supplies, we crave a better and more abundant food. The
man has never lived that can feed us ever. The human mind cannot be
enshrined in a person who shall set a barrier on any one side of
this unbounded, unboundable empire. It is one central fire, which,
flaming now out of the lips of Etna, lightens the Capes of Sicily,
and now out of the throat of Vesuvius, illuminates the towers and
vineyards of Naples. It is one light which beams out of a thousand
stars. It is one soul which animates all men."

And so he comes to the special application of the principles he has laid
down to the American scholar of to-day. He does not spare his censure;
he is full of noble trust and manly courage. Very refreshing it is
to remember in this day of specialists, when the walking fraction of
humanity he speaks of would hardly include a whole finger, but rather
confine itself to the single joint of the finger, such words as these:--

"The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the
ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the
hopes of the future. He must he a university of knowledges.... We
have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of
the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative,
tame.--The scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant.--The mind of
this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. There
is no work for any but the decorous and the complaisant."

The young men of promise are discouraged and disgusted.

"What is the remedy? They did not yet see, and thousands of young
men as hopeful now crowding to the barriers for the career do not
yet see, that if the single man plant himself indomitably on his
instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him."

Each man must be a unit,--must yield that peculiar fruit which he was
created to bear.

"We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands;
we will speak our own minds.--A nation of men will for the first
time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the
Di